Kabuki Dance

I was writing on a different topic, but the news that Barack Obama had voted for the FISA bill was so stunning in its implications that I felt it necessary to deal with those implications.

Obviously Obama played one tune during the primaries when he presented himself as the candidate of the progressives who had made all the difference in the 2006 election. However, once having secured the nomination he made a bee line for the Clintonian “dynamic middle”, which earlier Democrats would have called Republican. He rapidly eviscerated his slogan “Change you can believe in.” This kind of duplicity concerning our basic Constitutional rights is criminal and a transparent abrogation of his Oath of office to protect the Constitution. There was no political necessity for his vote. The veto of the worst president, with the lowest poll ratings, this country has ever seen would have had no significant adverse political consequences. There was, however, an economic reason. As Glen Greenwald has pointed out, there was an enormous amount of corporate money behind this bill. The corporations knew they had committed a crime and the only way out was congressional absolvency. Bush and the corporations knew that an investigation of their crimes would reveal their insidious effort to overthrow our democracy. There is but one explanation, corporate money bought Barack Obama.

It is becoming fashionable to defend Obama by referencing his oft repeated goal of bringing America together. To do this, it is said, he has to appeal to conservatives. My first response to that is that if shredding the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution is required to get votes from the Republicans, we have thereby confirmed what the Republicans are really interested in. Secondly this form of bringing America together is simply Clintonism served up again. Finally, it is far more important to deal with the real world this nation faces than bringing it together under false pretenses. I am sure that the Obama rhetoric that won the support of many progressives during the Democratic primary did not suggest a radical turn to the Right in the general election. To now claim that this is what Obama meant all along raises the question of why did he not spell out what he meant in the primaries? He knew the reasons for his support from progressives. This is the kind of dishonesty only a lawyer can appreciate.

But now what? He is still better than McCain some say. Some say support him but keep his feet to the fire. Given the trap he has led progressives into we may have to vote for him, but that makes him even more offensive to those who seek progressive honest government. In the next election it will make Kucinich much more viable.

More importantly, this episode of deception impresses upon me Ralph Nader’s argument that both political parties are under the control of corporate America. Mike Byron sees Republicans and Democrats as “stooges” of the corporations that move their resources from one to the other party whenever the natives get restless with the party in “power.” This is the corporate choreographed kabuki dance in which most of our politicians are little more than stylized actors in a formulaic play.

The only way to get out of this corporate domination is through a movement outside of both parties that either becomes a competing party or obtains sufficient popular support to radically change the Democratic Party. I do not see this happening within the Democratic Party as the Progressive Democrats of American, DFA or MoveOn believe, because that party believes the money of corporate wealth can buy them the elective offices they seek. Neither party served the needs of ordinary citizens during the Gilded Age of great rich/poor disparity at the end of the 19^th century. As a result a progressive movement developed and came to such prominence and power by articulating the plight of ordinary citizens that they successfully ran candidates in many states. While ultimately they failed to change the political landscape of the two party system, they did succeed in greatly influencing the Democratic Party. Their programs and political power were essential to the election of FDR and to the articulation of much of FDR’s program of redirecting the government of the United Sates to the service of its citizens rather than its corporations.

Bob Newhard